Disclaimer: While there are many products and technologies for VDI, including VMWare and Citrix, I’ll stay focused on using all Microsoft products…for now.
For the past few years I’ve been talking to many customers about the benefits of Virtualization. Not just for servers using Microsoft Hyper-V, but also Application Virtualization and Desktop Virtualization. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) has been around for a number of years. Many people think of this as Terminal Services. I guess that’s partially right since it is a desktop for an end user that is processed on a remote server. With Terminal Services(TS), it’s a single Server OS instance and each user connecting to that TS shares the same OS instance with all of the other users. What the end user gets is their own “Session”. Is it their own desktop? Kinda. It’s still a Server OS and there are issues with some software compatibility.
This is were VDI is a bit different. With VDI, you still have a number of end-users connecting to a given server, but now they connect into their own independent instance of an operating system. The server itself is doing Server Virtualization, but in the case of VDI it’s virtualization the client OS instance.
There are many articles and blog posts that talk about all of this, so I won’t go any further into the glories of VDI. The purpose of this blog post/series is to document my journey in building a VDI solution using the following components
Hardware
- Physical Server A – This is my main virtualization server. I’ll talk more about this later.
- Dell PowerEdge R300 (1U)
- Intel Xeon Quad-Core L5410 2.33GHz
- 24GB RAM
- OS Drive: 250GB SATA * 2 (Mirrored)
- Operating System: Windows Server 2008 R2 (Release Candidate)
- Physical Server B – This is my storage server. I wanted to get the best performance I could on the virtual machines. My big bottleneck was disk I/O. In previous labs, I had server A configured for Hyper-V and the virtual machines where on an External USB Drive. The throughput of USB was killing my performance and the USB Enclosure kept running into weird issues. Thus, I needed a better option. I built a “Server” based on a Barebones configuration via TigerDirect. Via my MSDN Subscription, I downloaded and deployed Windows Storage Server 2008 (SP2) on the new box. This gave me the ability for ISCSI support which I then used to for my Virtual Machine storage on Server A.
- Bar Bone Server purchased via TigerDirect.com
- AMD Phenom 9500 Quad-Core 2.20 GHz
- 4GB RAM
- OS Drive: 1 TB SATA 7200rpm
- Data Drive: 1.5 TB SATA 7200rpm * 3 in a RAID 5 configuration
- Operating System: Windows Storage Server 2008 (SP2)
- TrendNet Wireless Router – This is my wireless router (separate from my home wireless network..more on that later). It was pretty cheap on TigerDirect, but more importantly its also a Gigabit Ethernet Switch as well. This is the main firewall and connection to the Internet. I’m thinking this could be an issue for me down the road because of the lack of Firewall features (E.g. mapping a host header to a given virtual machine), but I’ll tackle that when I need to.
Software
- Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP)
- Application Virtualization
- Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2 (SCCM)
- Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 (SCOM)
- Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 (VMM)
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2
- Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2008
- Microsoft Windows 7
In building out this lab, I’ll be using the “Step-by-Step” guides provided by Microsoft, but I’ll of course go a bit off script and I’ll post what those are later.
My goal is not to re-document the steps in those guides, but do document any issues or improvements that I find along the way. At the end of all of this, I want an environment that I can show to customers how VDI works and it’s benefits. My next major goal is getting a partnership with ChipPC or Wyse so i can leverage their cool devices for a wicked on-premise demo. I think that would be much better than just a PowerPoint.
Stay tuned for more… (Post any suggestions or questions)
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